Saturday, October 11, 2014

One would be justified in saying that director Emilio Miraglia's genre output is hardly prolific, consisting of merely two films, 1971's La notte che Evelyn usci dalla tomba aka/ The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, and the film he made the following year, which just so happens to be the one we'll be focusing on tonight, but most of his fans would also agree that the caliber of his work far negates the scarcity of it. Nowhere is that more apparent than here, a stylishly framed giallo of the highest order, with plenty of atmosphere and complexity, vibrant colors, beautiful women, and violent death set against the gothic backdrop of a castle with a murderous history that even the most gluttonous genre-gastronomes will find themselves well gorged on by the final reel.

"Teste rotoleranno se non ottenete dalla mia vista!"
After watching adorable little blonde Kitty's unbalanced brunette sister Evelyn gleefully stab up and remove the head-piece of her favorite doll in front of an odd painting of two historical sisters at perpetual war with each other in hundred year intervals, their kindly old grandpa decides that it'd be a good time to lay the castle's well-worn legend of the Black Queen and Red Queen on them, having barely just stopped a crazed Evelyn (who's also been singsong-edly repeating "I am the Red Lady, and Kitty is the Black Lady!", mind you) from turning the ornately decorated blade on her own hysterical sister. That oughta calm them down, for sure. You see, the Black Queen killed the Red one, titularly stabbing her seven times, before she vengefully arose from her grave a year later, killing seven people herself, with her seventh and final victim being her sibling-in-black. You know, I'm no psychic or anything, but I'd lay a c-note on the possibility that something very similar to the legend is going to occur between these two tiny terrors when they grow up...

Damn, you leakin'....brang ambalamps.
Wouldn't you know it, years later, a beautiful adult version of Kitty (Barbara Bouchet), now a highly touted fashion photographer, stands to gain a large inheritance in twelve months time, except that a pale figure with dark hair in a red cape that many have identified as the Red Queen with the maniacal laugh herself, has begun stalking and offing folks in a savage (yet strangely inventive) manner nearby. Kitty's pretty sure it can't be Evelyn, since she ran off to the States...or she may have been accidentally snuffed during an icy catfight, and possibly by her golden-haired sister, at that. Then, we've got her ambitious beau, Martin (Ugo Pagliai), who's in line for promotion in fashion house management when he's not fighting off the amorous advances of Lulu Palm (Sybil Danning), a model who's even more enterprising than he is, and often quite vocal about her sexual prowess, when she isn't shedding every stitch of gear in a Manhattan millisecond, just to prove her point, Gods bless her. Herrings-a-plenty, and each as red as the titular Queen's memorable hooded cape, follow, and of course, I'm not going to spoil any of the gruesome goings on here for you. See it.

This particular blonde queen(Sybil Danning) kills me innumerable times.
The picturesque blonde Bouchet would appear throughout the decade in genre fare such as La tarantola dal ventre nero aka/ Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971) and Fernando Di Leo's Milano calibro 9 aka/ Caliber 9 (1972) , Casa d'appuntamento aka/ The French Sex Murders (1972), as well as Fulci's No si sevizia un paperino aka/ Don't Torture a Duckling (1972). She'd later represent the "Have's" (versus the "Have Not's", of course) in Scorsese's Gangs of New York (2002), which also features a brief cameo from Johnny Morghen, interestingly enough. Meanwhile, besides her roles in both of Miraglia's genre efforts, Marina Malfatti was showing up in things like Eugenio Martin's La ultima senora Anderson aka/ Death at the Deep End of the Swimming Pool (1971), Sette orchidee macchiate di rosso aka/ Seven Bloodstained Orchids (1972), Sergio Martino's Tutti i colori del buio aka/ All the Colors of the Dark (1972), and Il prato macchiato di rosso (1973).While we're on the subject, I should probably mention that Sybil Danning...sigh...would also appear in L'occhio nel labirinto (1972). You could still pick up the famed Miraglia Killer Queen box set from NoShame (which not only includes both films, but a nifty sculpted figure of the Red Queen herself, and was limited to seven thousand copies) on Amazon for fifty bucks, so why wouldn't you. Not on par with Argento at his best, by any stretch of the imagination, but still... Four wops.

Friday, October 10, 2014

While we Italian genre maniacs were all waiting patiently for the final installment of Dario Argento's Three Mothers trilogy at the tail end of the eighties, director Luigi Cozzi, of Starcrash (1978) and Contamination (1980) fame, went ahead and delivered his own take on the witchy goings on, in the form of tonight's review, with splashes of colored light, a pinch of gore, and obligatory rubbery sorceress action courtesy of Rosario Prestopino. The film, alternately known as Demons 6: De Profundis, showcases the familiar genre faces of Urbano Barberini, Florence Guerin, director Michele Soavi in a brief cameo, and of course, Caroline Munro. Wouldn't be a proper Cozzi film without her, and in this particular case, lots of her.

"Stress lines, cover wear, staining...and you call this copy VG/FN??"
We meet a rising actress and new mother named Anne (Florence Guerin) as she's working on a formulaic horror film based on Poe's The Black Cat for a hack director named Carl (Michele Soavi...yeah, right!) while her husband Marc (Urbano Barberini) jockeys to get his next project funded. With the upcoming film's subject matter concerning the third, and most horrible of the Mothers of Sorrow, as imagined by author Thomas De Quincey, and Marc even name dropping Dario Argento along the way, is it any wonder that such a blasphemous production would awaken a witch named Levana, with copyright infringement, possession, and bloody witchcraft-based death in mind. The rubbery resurrected spellcaster takes her would be cinematic namesake's role research personally, infiltrating her dreams with space footage borrowed from Cozzi's Hercules movies, repeatedly visiting from inside her mirror, Exorcist-style projectile vomiting, and even haunting the poor girl's refrigerator and creating refrigerator repairmen mirages, along the way. Just stay outta the veggie crisper, Levana, come on now.

She's Lump, she's Lump, she's Lump. She's got a rubbery head.
Of course, the film's producer, is an invalid named Leonard Levin (Brett Halsey) who may or may not be in secret cahoots with Levana, having that cleverly homonymous last name and all, and Anne's actress/gal pal and girlfriend to Marc's scriptwriter, the ever-mugging Nora (Caroline Munro)'s sun-scorched leathery skin is too similar in texture to Levana's latex black magic acne problem for her own good, methinks. Oh yeah, people get murdered along the way, there's a close up neck ventilation, a slow motion exploding midsection that will more than remind some of you of Cozzi's earlier Alien (1979) rip-off, Contamination (1980), and a television screen that vomits entrails and soupy goop in a similar fashion to that famous Cronenberg 1981 floor model. Levana kidnaps Anna's newborn, with designs on sacrificing her, naturally, but Anna allies herself with the spirit of a fairy, and that can only mean one thing: it's time for a lackluster, low budgeted, laser effect-packed "what the fuck just happened?" finale. Roll credits.

When Celiac sufferers eat pizza made with high gluten flour, this is often the tragic result.
Whether you consider this one Demons 6, Suspiria 3, or The Black Cat (I don't really consider it a true sequel to anything, really, more of an ultra cheap spin off), depends on what characteristic rises to the surface from Cozzi's cloudy soup of genre elements for you, I guess. If it's poxy eighties hair metal, nonsensical gore, and Urbano Barberini, then you'd roll with Demons 6. If the colored filters, cues lifted from Goblin's Suspiria score, and direct references to the Argento film stand out, you'd probably call it Suspiria 3. There's barely anything Black Cat-ish to speak of, here, though Fulci allegedly expressed some desire in taking the chair on the movie, despite having already covered all things ebony feline himself, some eight years earlier. You see where I'm going with this, don't you? On the scale, Il gatto's much too incoherent and balls up to merit anything more than a single Wop, though you completists and trash lovers might want to hunt down the Japanese VHS, which may very well still be the only legitimate release of the film to date, just the same.

Tuesday, October 7, 2014

I'm not gonna apologize for my several day sabbatical from the Wop that just so happened to coincide with the weekend of my birthday, which began promisingly enough, hanging out with several of my favorite genre stars in the so-called Electric City, but quickly dissolved into another antisocial bender after watching my kicker-less Lions lose one they had under wraps for most of sixty minutes on Sunday. Sure, they're notorious for such heartbreaking shenanigans, but it never gets any easier to stomach for the die hard fan base, especially those of us who've been watching since the late seventies...even if it's like, the five hundredth time it's happened. Linnea still gives the best hugs, and Jeffrey Combs is a trip, in person, as I'd long expected. Cat dead. Details later. Back to the usual rock n' roll...

"Wait until you feast your eyes upon my groovy head wrap...", quips Mara (Paola Tedesco).
After a stage actress named Mara (Paola Tedesco) narrowly misses being an eyewitness to the brutal blunt force trauma/neck ventilation upon a hapless old workaholic pharmacist as performed by your obligatory shadowy, black gloved killer , she finds herself drawn into a larger, more convoluted mystery, as investigated by her old flame, a cigar puffing, mustached busybody named Lukas (Corrado Pani), who's not at all connected to the police, but thinks nothing of putting his psychedelic head-wrapped love interest in dire jeopardy, with a rising tide of unsolved murders rushing in, as he focuses his attention on a spindly balding fellow named Bozzi (Fernando Cerulli), who's been receiving some interesting crank calls late at night, that seem to showcase some blood-curdling screams, barking Dobermans, trains, you know, that sort of thing.

"Chi di voi libertini sta per cambiare il mio pannolino di merda?"
Meanwhile, some poor female pawn in the deadly game gets her face cooked in an oven like so much manicotti, leading Lukas to lean on the escaped criminal named Ferrante (Franco Citti), who happened to be incarcerated while the growing list of victims served as jurors. A visibly annoyed Ferrante orders Lukas to chuck himself off of the top of a steep waterfall at gunpoint, which leads to an uninspired punch up on the rocks, after which Ferrante puzzlingly vows to help him uncover the real murderer. I'm on the lam, you alerted the authorities that I might be the killer they're looking for, you know what, why don't I help you find the guy. With an unglued Mara ready to split the scene for keeps, Lukas convinces her to instead travel to Padova with him (Can this guy sell ice cubes to Eskimos or what?) to tie the last few loose ends in the case, but Bozzi gets c.t.f.o.-ed in the tub in an unpleasant manner, indeed, before he can come clean to the would be-detective. Could it be overzealous Nazi-hunting Jews behind the horrible murders afterall? Hmmmm. I wonder.

After Janet Leigh in the shower, Fernando Cerulli in the tub just seems like overkill.
Tonight's review is a decent enough giallo from the guy who'd also later helm Solamente nero (1978), translated as The Cat With Jade Eyes, and re-released in the United States at the dawn of the eighties with a nifty new violent looking one sheet and title (Watch Me When I Kill) that misleadingly disguises the film as a straight slasher flick, which it really never was. I never noticed any jade-eyed cats either, but who really pays that much attention to minor details anyway, right? Bido's leads were Paola Tedesco who'd appeared in things like Alberto Di Martino's Crime Boss (1972) and Dario Argento's La porta sul buio aka/ Door Into Darkness (1973) series, and Corrado Pani, of nothing I can recall seeing, offhand. Mi scusi, Corrado. Bido himself, turns up in a cameo as a dance choreographer. On the scale, this cat scores a pair of Wops, and is always worth a look for any enthusiasts of the genre searching for new/old material to screen. Look for it.

Do those peepers look Schweinfurt green to you? Baby blue, I dunno, I'm no color specialist.

Thursday, October 2, 2014

Some Italian genre directors, like Fabrizio De Angelis (under his favorite pseudonym Larry Ludman, here) fully realize that inanimate-looking prop sharks and grainy stock footage aren't the only homicidal animals they can sculpt a horrendous Jaws rip-off around, as the international title of tonight's review, Killer Crocodile (Murder Alligator, too, I shit you not), would lead you to believe. To fabricate Fabrizio's raucous rampaging reptile, none other than the gore FX maestro, Giannetto De Rossi, was called upon, and you can see what the results looked like for yourselves, below. Not quite as jaw-dropping as his work on Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1974) or Zombi 2 (1979), but the croc's signature wheeze (Go easy on the 'Ports, big fella?) sounds an awful lot like one of De Rossi's flesh-eating ghouls from the latter film, to me.

"Questo ragazzo sapore come pollo!"
It all kicks off when two night fishermen are interrupted by a legendary killer crocodile. How do we know this? It must be the dramatic titles hastily slapped over a freeze frame of the attacking beast, around one minute in. No tension-packed slow build to a shocking final reel reveal here, no sir. Enter a vanilla assembly of would be environmentalists, as led by Richard Crenna's son, who unwittingly stumble upon several fifty-five gallon hand-painted drums of toxic waste sloppily dumped along the river's edge, then lean on a very sweaty and very irritable local judge (Van Johnson) to, you know, clean it all up, maaaaaan. Only he's pals with a cat named Foley (Bill Wohrman) who can't wait to dump his next big shipment of waste in the river. The group's token black girl, Conchita, gets chewed up and spit out first, leading her mourning friends to, you know, side with the croc, maaaaan, instead of the local croc hunting son of a bitch, a scarred up adventurer in a panama hat named Joe (Ennio Girolami), who shares a roomy shack of corrugated cardboard and plywood with his pet snake. "C'monnn Joe. You aren't afraid of a...killer crocodile, are you?", one of the kids actually asks him at one point. Seriously.

How could we have guessed she wasn't gonna be the "final girl".
It seems that Foley's careless dumping of toxic waste has mutated the prop-odile into monstrous (and varying, depending on the shot) proportions, and after comically terrorizing a little girl on a sinking chunk of pier, it starts picking off our young peaceniks, who camp out on the shore of the river in a show of support for the misunderstood monster, who's gotta endure being harpooned and ridden like a surfboard by the relentless Joe. Once their male buddies become the croc's dinner (and not the black girl with two lines, and her dog), the formerly environmentally conscious survivors naturally declare war on the amphibious beast and team up with Joe, who's prone to carrying his shotgun everywhere he goes, and also dramatically admiring his scarred reflection in the mirror in his shack. Foley reassures the judge that he can handle the animal himself, and by "handle", he means "get his arm chewed off after leaving the sweaty adjudicator to drown in a dastardly double cross". Sound ridiculous? Just wait until a bloodied and battered Joe miraculously pops out of the trees and throws one of the boys his cheesy hat, no doubt inspiring the young man to blow the beast up by chucking an outboard motor into its open yap. He repeatedly screams, "Yeah! Yeah!! YEAHHH!!" like a fanatical maniac, while being showered in raining blood. I had to laugh, and you might, too.

"I was in 'The Caine Mutiny' with Bogart, and now I'm doing fucking 'Murder Alligator'...", laments Van Johnson.
Even maestro Riz Ortolani, how can I put this... borrows generously from John Williams' groundbreaking 1975 score in creating one that befits such an unapologetic low budget rip-off of the Spielberg film. De Rossi's animatronic crocodile, on the other hand, almost looks too impressive for the cheap affair, or at least, it might have, if they didn't show so much of it and so damned often. De Rossi himself would direct the sequel, Killer Crocodile 2, which happened to be shot at the exact same time as it's predecessor, using the same cast. While the gore here is ample and of passable quality, the (non-)acting, editing, and script are all unintentionally laughable, dragging the whole scareless, tension-free production into single Wop territory, as one might have expected.